The Tories are in tatters

A disappearing phantom

In A Song Of Ice And Fire the death of the quietly competent Lannister patriarch, Tywin, leads to the capital city of Kings Landing being flooded with various refugees and religious lunatics. The faith militant, as they are called, find that they are increasingly able to assert themselves against what remains of the Lannister family, an unprepared boy-king Tommen and his vindictive yet incompetent alcoholic mother Cersei Lannister.

Something similar seems to be happening to the Conservative Party, which as of this morning looks like it has just lost a deposit for a byelection for the first time in over forty years. Apart from a tiny number of exceptions the serious, normal people with a connection to the institution have moved into positions in private companies where their time working as special advisers is well numerated, leaving politics altogether. Only a small number of its current staff have any real experience in government. If the Tories were polling at around 35-40% significantly ahead of Labour, as oppositions normally are at this point in a Parliamentary term, experienced professionals seeking to advance their careers would be leading it from the front, but because that attention is being diverted to Reform, the Tories are stuck with whoever they can get their hands on.

So the usual antibodies against fruity concepts and individuals have been weakened substantially. Its main campaigning focus in the past three months has been leading a ban on social media for under 16s, an authoritarian idea which will not work on its own terms (less than half of parents even say they will observe the ban) which is the result of strenuous campaigning by Jonathan Haidt, one of the more dribbling intellectual dark web figures who wrote an entire book admitting that he had no evidence for his thesis that social media is making children’s mental health worse, but asking the audience to come up with a different one if they were so bloody clever. Look at his face and tell me you do not see something of the high sparrow to him.

Whatever you think of the policy it is a strange peccadillo for an opposition to obsess over. You can’t imagine it happening under Cameron, or Boris. It might be hard for younger readers to remember what normal opposition politics is like, if they have only known Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer during Covid and then Kemi Badenoch, but normally the press and public have a few years to learn about the main players in a Shadow Cabinet and hear them put forward a grand over-arching political narrative about society, during the Miliband years it was Tory Austerity, before then Gordon Brown sold the gold etc.